Happy 50th anniversary to BYTE magazine, which a young version of me happily devoured or at least stared at, trying to understand it (I was 8 or 9 or 10…) Much of its cover art also stuck with me as interesting visions of computing. Here's all of 1977–1986, my favorite decade of the bunch.

Possible causes of your problems. It’s a diagram that (sadly) still seems relevant in 2025, so reposting a year and a bit on.

I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.

Our Rowboat tool is about instantly seeing what's in a dataset, so we added a Chrome Extension that lets you open random datasets from all over the internet. Right click, poof! 0.2 seconds later we see what this dataset actually looks like. No workspace to set up, no waiting for the app, no db.

(by Nathan W. Pyle @nathanwpyle.bsky.social)

omg, right down to the trackball… want

The MacBook has a sensor that tracks how far the lid is open or closed, so our hero has found the private API that gets this information, so that we can make theremin noises with it. Code (and compiled app) at the link…

Be still my heart: a new blog dedicated to productivity tools from the late 70s through the mid-90s. (I think about this stuff way too much—how a lot could be done with very little, and understanding what made those things tick versus today's tools.)

very few ppl are as talented and fortunate as bill cunningham. but i often think about how he was able to live an honest life doing what he loved because he lived simply. even at the height of his career, he slept on a cot. as he once said, "if you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do."

“We understand that over the past 250-odd years, you have come to rely on the services provided by the U.S. of A.: postal delivery, representative government, edible food, clean water, lifesaving vaccines, and no kings—ever, guaranteed. Well, 250 years of free is enough.”

Labor Day cartoon by Fred Wright, 1962.

Pretty great that my staff enjoy each other enough that they went out of their way to run 7(!) miles together to get to the studio. 🩵

“It seems inevitable that a computer chip will generate more awe-inspiring drawings than I do. My survival as an artist will depend on whether I’ll be able to offer something that A.I. can’t: drawings that are as powerful as a birthday doodle from a child.” www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

“Everyone in computer science has bought into the pact of evaporating oceans for better coding assistants. But scaling is all you need until you hit diminishing returns. Overindexing on the bitter lesson is a commitment to nihilism.”

This week‘s issue of Die @zeit.de features a number of travel drawings I have made all across Germany. A big thank you to the editorial and art department and the great @christophamend.bsky.social for masterminding the collaboration and the interview. www.christophniemann.com/detail/zeit-...

An accessible thread on the history of promises to make programming more accessible

!!!

New single dropped! "Misdirection" is the second single from the upcoming album by our band You, Me, Everybody. It's the bluegrass banger. www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzqU... Follow us on Spotify and eventually we'll be able to afford a coffee! open.spotify.com/album/342xor...

“Point to the thing you are sure Trump is not allowed to do, and tell me who you imagine is going to stop him. You will quickly realize that what we’re pinning our hopes on is not the rule of law. What we’re hoping for is a mutiny.”

Worlds colliding this morning while I was looking something up, and instead found this “Candid Photos of Computer Scientists” collection, and I'm scrolling through, only to see…my Dad!? Here he is behind the podium at ACM SIGMOD in 1974. Meanwhile, the photographer? None other than Ben Shneiderman.

But also, perfect cover: just like Manchin, whose words try to claim the “center,” but there he is, demonstrably, visually, so far to the right that he's falling off the edge.

This NYT quote about “AI” in 80s Pac-Man is comically bad. But rather than dwelling on that, the way the ghosts work to make it *feel* like they were “thinking” is a really cool example of the exact opposite. It's a series of really simple deterministic rules: web.archive.org/web/20191107...

Thank you to @monachalabi.bsky.social for this powerful graphic, which starkly pictures the severity of the Israeli government’s policy of mass death through forced starvation.

We've found this really helpful: you drop a dataset into Rowboat & the moment you find an insight, this gives you an image to drop into an email, a slide deck, Slack…  Too much visualization is single player mode, when the point should be socialization: how do you share/discuss/decide with others?

BSODs look different in the UK

Been thinking about this a lot and I'm glad someone else wrote it up. “The Dictator’s Innovation Trap… The Brain Drain You’re Not Thinking About… The Infrastructure You Take For Granted… The Trust Problem… The Historical Precedent…” www.techdirt.com/2025/07/17/f...

Pretty excited that our ongoing work with @pardissabeti.bsky.social and Christian Happi is one of just five(!) finalists for MacArthur's 100 & Change program. www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSek... www.macfound.org/press/semifi...

Meanwhile, on I-93 in Boston… 💔 💪

A Borges story about a guy who gets AI to summarize all the world’s information for him, and then summarize the summary, until the AI has the whole world summarized into a single word. He sits alone at his desk, staring at the word, repeating it endlessly, certain he is experiencing everything

“avoid confusion over immigration”!?! I cannot stomach how quickly this illegal, un-American nonsense has been normalized.

Incredible thread…

brb, writing my “LLMs Considered Harmful” letter to Communications of the ACM

If a colleague had the reliability rate of an LLM, they would be fired. If ordinary* software did, it would be uninstalled. LLMs require the chat format, because chat makes us party to the conversation. We insert the meaning ourselves - and hold it to a different standard. It's the mirror effect.

In between our other projects, we continue working on Rowboat, our tool for instantly making sense of very large datasets. Lots of this work has been led by @kayserifserif.place who just wrote up several of the new features: fathom.info/notebook/250...

I still can't get past the idea that people in America are now supposed to accept that this is a valid form of law enforcement and just assume it's fine when random dudes in groups with face-coverings, no ID, no warrant, & no uniform grab people off the street and force them into unmarked vehicles

Visual Basic 3.0, from the olden days before “Regular” and “Normal” font weights were invented.

wip

Proud of my crew @fathom.info who turned around a version of our “Lookout” platform in just six hours after receiving data for the Sierra Leone outbreak. We've been working with Pardis and Christian since 2020, and while the circumstances are devastating, we've been building for moments like this.

leftists: that thing you teach us in school to be terrified of is happening historians: that thing is definitely happening star wars: here is a beat-for-beat breakdown of how the thing happens, but with pew pew lasers. we know you watched it news outlets: these protesters are out of control

not the main issue here but i'd really appreciate it if democratic politicians spoke out in support of big-city life and culture with the same energy and reverence that all politicians have for small towns los angeles is "real america" and so are all the other big cities the president hates

Had a great time talking about process, pandemic response, and our failed attempts at branding/marketing for rowboat.xyz at @vizknowledge.bsky.social here in Finland today. #VK25 What an incredible speaker lineup: vizknowledge.aalto.fi/schedule.html

Incredible trip to see some Leventhal maps at the Boston Public Library last week. Many thanks to Garrett Dash Nelson and Emily Bowe for sharing a bit of the collection, and taking some time out of their day to geek out about maps with us.

“Al Companion always shows on the home screen.” Nothing says “people love our AI tools!” like the decision to explicitly disallow your (paying!) users from turning them off.

The bipartisan framing of Chinese people as dangerous to the United States has been building up for years and has created this deeply racist and xenophobic opening for the Trump administration. I stand with my Chinese colleagues and all of our Chinese students. 🧪

Great piece about Moog, paired with an excellent explanation of how synthesizers work. Also features quotes from one of my all-time favorite professors, Joe Paradiso: arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014...

“…how is it that so many other financial heavyweights, with so many aides and so many resources, fail to produce annual letters that match Buffett’s? Many are perceptive, sure. But why don’t more deploy the brevity, wit and humility that makes Buffett’s missives so successful?” on.ft.com/44zVTTh